Dire warming report triggers calls for more action from China

doi:10.1126/science.373.6557.842

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DOI	10.1126/science.373.6557.842
	Dire warming report triggers calls for more action from China
	Lili Pike
	2021-08-20
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2021
英文摘要	The sweeping new report documenting the world’s changing climate released on 9 August by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has put a fresh spotlight on China, a country responsible for more than one-quarter of the world’s annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Climate advocates hope the report will encourage China, which has lagged other big emitters in pledges to reduce CO2 emissions, to take bolder action. Whether it can begin to slash its output significantly in the next 10 years will help determine the magnitude of the global crisis, they say. But whereas many heads of state called for enhanced climate action following the IPCC report, Chinese leaders have stayed quiet. In a statement to Agence France-Presse, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs simply reiterated China’s existing climate policies and said the world should have faith in its climate actions. Taking firm action is in not only the planet’s interest, but China’s own. The IPCC report offers a grim synthesis of what China can expect under various scenarios. If temperatures climb 2°C above preindustrial levels, heavy precipitation will become more intense and frequent; drought will become more severe and regular in large parts of China; tropical cyclones will increase in intensity; and, by the end of the century, sea levels will rise 0.3 to 0.5 meters and temperatures in some regions could surpass 41°C on 30 days of the year. From its own studies, including the annual “blue book” from the China Meteorological Administration, the Chinese government is well aware of the rising risks of climate change. And the July flood in Zhengzhou, in China’s central Henan province, which killed nearly 300 people and displaced 1.5 million, was a stark reminder of the toll more extreme weather can exact. The storm’s severity surprised even Chinese climate scientists. “Of course we know climate change will bring more and more extreme precipitation and droughts,” says Wang Wen, a hydrologist at Hohai University and one of the lead authors of the report’s chapter on the regional impacts of climate change. Still, “We really didn’t expect such heavy precipitation.” But China’s current climate plans fall short of what IPCC says is needed to stave off the worst climate impacts. In September 2020, President Xi Jinping announced the country will aim to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. The promise was in part a response to a 2018 IPCC special report that concluded the world will be much better off if it succeeds in limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C, says Jiang Kejun, a senior researcher at the Energy Research Institute, a think tank affiliated with China’s economic planning agency. “IPCC reports really influence our policymaking,” says Jiang, who is also an IPCC lead author. China also promised to level off its emissions sometime before 2030—a deadline by which the United States and the European Union, the biggest emitters historically, have pledged to cut their emissions by half from 2005 levels. However, the 2018 report showed that sticking to the 1.5°C target requires countries to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, not 2060. “I think [China is] going to start to get even more pressure to move that 2060 carbon neutrality goal to 2050 because that is really what is in line with the IPCC science,” says Angel Hsu, who studies Chinese climate policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. To meet the earlier deadline, China needs to sharply reduce emissions in the coming 5 to 10 years, according to a recent study ( Science , 23 April, p. [378][1]). At the moment, carbon emissions are still growing; China was the only major economy where they climbed even amid the pandemic in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency. China’s special envoy for climate change, Xie Zhenhua, recently said developing countries like China should have more time to reach carbon neutrality than nations that industrialized earlier. But at a press conference last week, Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said China and the other G-20 nations “bear a special responsibility.” She called on them to be “ambitious” in the fresh emissions reduction plans that all nations are expected to submit ahead of the next major international climate negotiations, in Glasgow, U.K., in November. So far, 81 countries have submitted plans, and China has pledged to do so before the meeting begins. European leaders and climate advocates have pushed for China to move its emissions peaking date up from 2030 to 2025, and some have called on the country to stop building coal plants. Last year, China accounted for three-quarters of the new coal power that came online worldwide; more than 200 gigawatts of additional capacity is still planned. But Jiang says the plants are being built to provide energy security and will likely only run at a low capacity. “We can see that coal use will peak soon,” he says. Just how ambitious China will be in tackling its emissions leading up to 2030 may become clearer in the next few months. For now, Chinese climate scientists say IPCC’s message has landed in Beijing. “We cannot wait anymore,” Jiang says. “This is the time we decide our future, not only for China, but also for the world.” [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/372/6540/378
领域	气候变化 ; 资源环境
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文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/336009
专题	气候变化资源环境科学
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Lili Pike. Dire warming report triggers calls for more action from China[J]. Science,2021.
APA	Lili Pike.(2021).Dire warming report triggers calls for more action from China.Science.
MLA	Lili Pike."Dire warming report triggers calls for more action from China".Science (2021).